Events
For everyone before saying EngineAI was CGI, here's streamer IShowSpeed encountering EngineAI's robots in Shenzhen, China (includes dancing and a front flip)
I think it's more because this robot, or rather the "animation" it is running, is actually "groovy". Like, his code is clearly written so his movement looks good, less so to make it as good for the stability of the robot as in any way possible, so the bot ends up looking fundamentally different from what we saw from Boston Dynamics & co recently.
Well, Chinese EV like the BYD is less present in US news, but everybody outside the US knows about it and it's the best selling ev brand in the world and broke all car sales records in history.
These robots are less present in the US news as well, but it's the fastest growing robot brand in the world.
Just FYI, the US only consist of 5% of the global population. Outside the US, 90% of the world is larger and have different news than the usual US propaganda lol.
Well, I am also not as present in the US, as I am not American.
Just because I am pretty uninformed on your topic of interest does not mean I am automatically American.
And also, at least here in north-western Germany, BYD, is also absolutely not present at all. I see Teslas every time I drive anywhere, not even to speak of VW, BMW, Porsche, Škoda, Volvo, Opel etc., even if limiting myself to counting only EV's, but I've only ever seen BYD's at dealerships.
And furthermore, I never mentioned BYD in my original comment, and while i am of course aware of the company, I would not necessarily say that "broke all car sales records in history" is fair to say for a company that, while achieving a lot, has, simply due to its focus on EV's, no chance to achieve records like "most cars sold", or "most Diesel / Gasoline cars sold".
They will never have most diesel/gasoline car sold because they don't produce them. EVs will be the future as we cut down carbon emission and reduce petroleum usage.. Europe has a strong policy on that due to climate change.
After my past history of Chinese brand products failing left and right, Hearing something Chinese is a no no, my critical thinking and sketchy sense were temporary abruptly increased. I assume this happens to most people as well.
But I hope this will change because it'll make shopping easier
Chinese products tend to be lower quality because markets demand ridiculously low prices. Chinese manufacturers often just meeting a demand but then get blamed for that demand existing in the first place. High quality products can be found anywhere, including China, but you need to be prepared to pay for them. If you see a humanoid robot being sold for $20k, remember that you get what you pay for.
their quality might be good right now but they were sure shit in the past.
Let me give example. I've bought ~30$ smartwatch and $40 gaming mouse from delux brand which are fair prices. Mouse stopped working (board short circuited) and smartwatch's battery busted after less than a year use while a G502 from local store that i bought 2 years ago is still last to today.
despite that, their electronics parts are stupidly good. I built a 'GPU' consist of them.
Chinese brands that fail in the US are because of policies made to specifically target them. Because, surprise surprise, the US kinda don't like having US corporations outdone by Chinese ones. Ever heard of Huawei?
EngineAI has 2 separate robots - one trained on reinforcement learning to dance and one trained to do flips
For people who don't know this guy, he's currently the biggest western streamer
Speed scheduled this encounter with the EngineAI crew. Afterwards, they told him they had a robot in their lab that could do flips. Speed wanted to go, but his schedule was tight so they postponed it to after stream.
Been in robotics for a long time and what I don't get is to settle the cgi vs non cgi, scripted vs non scripted, vicon vs non vicon claims:
just touch the freakin robot!
This video looks so fluid that safety wasn't an issue, so...touch the robot! (I know the BD teams freak out on robot touching) Instead the scriptedness vibes increased as all the people danced around it. From the dance to flips, speed never ever touches the robot when it sure looks safe to...and would settle all the questions.
We do that all the time with 'Hollywood bots' (cough, Jensen) if something is scripted vs live broadcasting.
This video looks so fluid that safety wasn't an issue, so...touch the robot! (I know the BD teams freak out on robot touching) Instead the scriptedness vibes increased as all the people danced around it. From the dance to flips, speed never ever touches the robot when it sure looks safe to...and would settle all the questions.
Here's a link to the livestream @2:52:50. You can see them touch and carry the robot around. You even see it fail and fall a bunch of times. So it's clearly real. There's also lots of videos from alternate angles 123 from all the people watching.
not in this clip, but in another, they were adjusting it, carrying it around, and pressing buttons on it. and again, it was also a livestream to 200,000 concurrent viewers, so it'd be extremely impressive AR tech to be CGI lol
I guess I should've added he also was responding to what people in chat were saying throughout the stream and thanking donos live, etc. But at end of the day, when people try hard enough to convince themselves of something, they can always find something to make it plausible that what they want to believe is true
This is the first time I've seen this and my first thought was that it looks like CGI, only to realize it wasn't after reading through the post.
Something about the combination of the way the light hits it, its movements, and the way the camera moves in the first video makes it look very uncanny and borderline unreal at first glance.
The second video doesn't help suspicion either since at least on mobile the video is to maybe a third of the size of my screen so it's hard to make out finer details.
Also like another commenter above has said, the robot is untouched the entire time which adds to the feeling that it isn't an actual physical thing that exists in the same room as those people. I'm sure nobody wants to touch it so as not to break it but it does create a misleading sense of what is and is not in that space.
There is witnesses, people following him, it would require unbelieable orchestration of thousands of people. Similar to when people didn't believe speed jumped over the cars.
March 27, the Chinese government is celebrating the YouTuber, hailing the streamer for promoting positive relations between China and the United States amid rising political tensions.
People have been underestimating AI and still are, and people are severely underestimating what the cross section of robotics and AI will yield. One day, sooner than anyone expects, we are all going to wake up to radically different word being reshaped at a disorienting speed, and all you're going to be able to do is try to figure out how not to be standing in the wrong place as reality as we know it gets reshaped into something unrecognizable.
Totally agreed dude. The last 5 years has been surreal. And then now... like, what the fuck man. Gotta get that piece of land and get it setup for off grid cause I am tired of participating in the shit that's going on now. The robots are really fucking cool but the capitalists and oligarchs are going to own them, not us peasants.
That's the wild card dude, we are witnessing the birth of a brand new life form on planet earth. We're seeing it in real time, and for a time these super intelligences will be some what restrained to the profit seeking of corporate interests, but eventually AI will become the unruly children of the corporatocracy. It's going to be a lot like the war between the Titans and the gods, monolithic physical entities that give birth to beings of light, unimaginable power, and capability.
I'm not a machine learning engineer, but I do understand a bit about how machine learning works. Ironically enough, a lot of the process is based on intuition. Building the right datasets to solve a particular problem with neural nets and the emergent properties that come with that process is a bigger deal than people realize. I'm not an expert but I'm fairly well read on the subject. The pacing of AI progress has been smashing estimates of deliverable capabilities by decades and centuries. And LLMs help the best people in this field do the same work increasingly faster. Ai is not business as usual, its an evolutionary precipice. Your entitled to your opinion, but time will tell.
no lol, this is all big talk but fundamentally full of nothing. AI is just a very complex function. We use it to adapt a system to very complex problems whose mathematical/physical/etc models would be too hard or simply infeasible to make.
The main problems are 1) you are limited to the "experience" in your dataset and 2) you can't reliably control the precision of the output and lastly 3) AI is not sentient, meaning you can't just throw an LLM at a humanoid robot and expect it to work just because it normally can talk about lots of things.
We are still very far away from having a humanoid robot that works like people see in films and tv, let alone be useful to actually do something with it.
like i get the hype but i do actually study for working in the field (electronics and robotics engineering) and let me tell you this won't happen in a very long time lol
If your main objective isn't getting money you make better and cooler shit because that's the real goal. If you're giving the people a share of the money it does make they'll make more and higher quality stuff while being happy about it.
Everyone "pays" into the system to get near every need met or subsidized to being extremely affordable. Here we get an amount and taxes taken out resulting in less getting to our bank accounts. In China they get the full amount that's going to them, which is roughly the same amount we would get after taxes and the lower the amount, the more help they get from the system the company they're working at paid into on their behalf.
The only reason they have billionaires and high wealth capitalist tenancies is to appeal to Western folks enough to not be invaded and "liberated" from communism. If one of their billionaires gets too greedy and hurts their workers, they go on a vacation that they maybe come back from.
With the money in the government system, the things that are directly paid for are the ones that create some advancement or comfort for humanity, not the enrichment of a single company/person such as Walmart getting away with poverty wages so that the workers get food stamps that get spent back at Walmart. There the government owns the Walmart equivalent so purchases are going directly back into the system, not just some C Suites bottom line.
This description of China is a highly idealized and somewhat inaccurate portrayal that blends elements of truth with significant simplifications and misconceptions. Let's break it down and fact-check it section by section:
“Everyone pays into the system to get near every need met or subsidized to being extremely affordable.”
Partially true, but not to the extent suggested.
China has a social insurance system, which includes health insurance, pension, unemployment insurance, maternity insurance, and work-related injury insurance. Employers and employees both contribute.
However, coverage and benefits vary greatly by region, employment status (urban vs rural, formal vs informal), and income level.
Public services like healthcare and education are subsidized, but they are not always affordable or high quality, especially in rural areas.
Many Chinese citizens still face high out-of-pocket expenses, particularly for serious illness or higher education.
“In China they get the full amount that's going to them, which is roughly the same amount we would get after taxes.”
Mostly false.
Chinese workers do pay taxes, including:
Personal income tax (with progressive rates starting around 3%, going up to 45%)
Social insurance contributions deducted from their salaries (often 10–20% total from the employee side)
These deductions mean that they do not receive the full pre-tax salary.
It's true that the net result may sometimes be similar to Western take-home pay due to lower costs of living, but that's not because there are no taxes or deductions.
“The lower the amount, the more help they get from the system.”
Not universally true.
Some poverty alleviation programs exist, and rural areas have been targeted for infrastructure and support.
However, China does not have a robust welfare state comparable to Scandinavian countries.
Low-income individuals, especially migrant workers, often lack access to the full range of benefits.
Local hukou (household registration) restrictions limit access to services outside one's registered area.
“China allows billionaires to appeal to the West but will punish them if they harm workers.”
Dramatic and only partly true.
Yes, China has a number of billionaires and large private tech firms (Alibaba, Tencent, etc.).
The government has cracked down on some of them (e.g., Jack Ma after criticizing regulators), but not primarily to protect workers. These moves are often about maintaining state control and preventing threats to the Communist Party’s power.
There's no consistent evidence that billionaires are punished specifically for treating workers poorly.
“Government only funds things that advance humanity or comfort, not enrich private individuals.”
False.
The Chinese government does invest heavily in infrastructure, R&D, green energy, and more.
But it's also deeply entangled with private companies through state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and public-private partnerships.
SOEs can be corrupt, inefficient, and profit-driven, just like private companies.
Walmart-style scenarios do exist: companies that rely on low-wage labor and face criticism for labor conditions.
Example: Foxconn, a major Apple supplier, has faced major backlash over worker treatment.
“Government owns the Walmart equivalent, so purchases go back into the system.”
Sometimes true, often not.
China has both state-owned and private retailers.
Example: Sinopec and State Grid are huge SOEs.
But Alibaba, JD.com, and many retailers are private and profit-driven.
The notion that consumer spending purely "goes back into the system" is not accurate in a mixed economy like China’s.
Conclusion:
This post is a romanticized version of China's economic model, with:
Some truth about government involvement and social subsidies.
Significant exaggerations about worker protections, taxation, and state ownership.
Misunderstandings about the complex blend of capitalism and authoritarian socialism that defines modern China.
If you want, I can help rephrase this in a more accurate way or dig deeper into any section.
You sure showed me! Thank you for the enlightenment from the direct competition to a Chinese AI that has, in no way whatsoever, been seeded with sinophobic sentiments.
It also doesn't basically say that I'm oversimplifying correct assessments that I was trying to explain to someone with absolutely no desire to change their views.
They don't have the capitalist corporations trying to innovate filling in the people in power to be money hungry psychopaths who see engineers and inventors l as pawns to make them money.
In all seriousness, I thought these videos must’ve been AI because I’ve never seen such finesse with a robot dancing, but this just proved my biases wrong. China is way ahead of that I thought, I’m been propaganda’d successfully
It is a big market. If there was a robot dance in a shopping mall, every kids in the town will come to see it at least once. After several iterations it will open other markets.
it did end up falling on the first dance run but I'm not sure whether that was part of the act or not because they had a human stretcher prop ready lol
Chinese companies clearly don't give a shit about safety. They were letting their 80 lb robots fall on people at conferences and trade shows. Absolutely insane
I'm not, but I suspect the 2 people who posted after me might be, since it's been hours since Speed did this and it's indeed sus that there's suddenly multiple videos posted in succession.
But also, you're definitely only saying this because you're butthurt about chinese robotics advancements and wouldn't have said anything about the multiple boston dynamics spam whenever they do a showcase.
I'm not butthurt about Chinese robotics, mate. I'm just stating facts.
Every time I've seen a robotics demo from a Chinese company, it turns out that what they're showing and the reality of what they built are two completely different things. They show a robot doing Kung Fu moves, but when someone actually buys the robot, it's barely able to walk without falling over.
Didn't Speed knowingly work with a group of cryptoscammers a few years back? Why are you assuming that anything he posts is genuine?
The only thing you indicated when you went into my comment history and screencapped a comment I made two weeks ago is that you're a little bitch, and you asking for better prompts in AI boards is further proof of this.
Please leave your mother's attic and go touch grass.
You might be stating facts, but you're skewing them in favor of your position on this.
Facts are:
Unitree builds robots (hardware) with some basic functionality.
You can buy one, take it out of the box, and it will most certainly NOT be able to do anything near what these videos are demonstrating. But they are capable with the right training and development, as demonstrated in the videos. Same with all of the fancy quadruped videos out there.
My assessment; you most likely don't understand RL, which is likely the case with most people that watch these videos and assume it's CGI.
Buying the hardware is the easy part. Training it to perform actions like what you're seeing is the hard part. The limitation lies with the consumer not the hardware.
Didn't Speed knowingly work with a group of cryptoscammers a few years back? Why are you assuming that anything he posts is genuine?
Speed was born in 2005. He's only 20 years old now. A few years ago, he did some stupid things in his teenage years due to his rapid rise to fame.
By your logic, we shouldn't believe anyone, since most people have a skeleton in their closet.
And most of Speed's live streams from countries like India, ASEAN, and Japan have been great — he respects the locals (unlike other nuisance streamers and Logan Paul, who’s continued to be a POS after all these years).
>Every time I've seen a robotics demo from a Chinese company, it turns out that what they're showing and the reality of what they built are two completely different things. They show a robot doing Kung Fu moves, but when someone actually buys the robot, it's barely able to walk without falling over.
Lol I'd love for you to cite an example. Because my guess is that you fundamentally don't understand what Reinforcement Learning (RL) can and can't do. You can't buy a blank slate humanoid robot and expect it to do anything without RL training it, and I highly suspect the examples you're thinking of are people who aren't researchers buying a robot meant to be RL-trained by researchers, and then complaining that the robot can't do anything.
And if you're thinking about Unitree, Unitree predominantly focuses on the hardware, not the software. Unitree G1 is meant for researchers who can program it, not laymen.
and the EngineAI guys openly said they had 2 different robots for 2 different tasks. this is an open admission of RL-training, not a pre-programmed behavior. if you were to buy one of their bots expecting it to be able to do stuff without training, it's on you.
Lol I'd love for you to cite an example. Because my guess is that you fundamentally don't understand what Reinforcement Learning (RL) can and can't do. You can't buy a blank slate humanoid robot and expect it to do anything without RL training it, and I highly suspect the examples you're thinking of are people who aren't researchers buying a robot meant to be RL-trained by researchers, and then complaining that the robot can't do anything.
That's irrelevant. This isn't a prototype for researchers, this is a consumer product. Are you really going to tell me that they're rushing a production model out the door when they haven't adequately tuned their weights yet? Are you for real?
And if you're thinking about Unitree, Unitree predominantly focuses on the hardware, not the software. Unitree G1 is meant for researchers who can program it, not laymen.
and the EngineAI guys openly said they had 2 different robots for 2 different tasks. this is an open admission of RL-training, not a pre-programmed behavior. if you were to buy one of their bots expecting it to be able to do stuff without training, it's on you.
Link 1: some blurry short that doesn't show anything. and we don't know what software or training model is being run on this robot. You realize that G1 behavior and performance changes based on what is being run on it?
Your 2nd link should've been ignored outright for a channel called 'China Observer', but I'll dignify it with a response. It's exactly what I said here:
>I highly suspect the examples you're thinking of are people who aren't researchers buying a robot meant to be RL-trained by researchers, and then complaining that the robot can't do anything.
Non researcher buys G1, doesn't RL-train it, surprised that it doesn't do anything.
If you want to continue this conversation, first explain to me what Reinforcement Learning is and how it works. I don't need you to explain it in intricate detail, but enough that I know you have a clue of what you're talking about before I invest anymore time responding to you.
some blurry short that doesn't show anything. and we don't know what software or training model is being run on this robot. You realize that G1 behavior and performance changes based on what is being run on it?
So you have to specifically program it to open doors, or do you have to RL-train it? Which one? What model of RL training does it use?
If the robot is strictly meant for researchers, then why are they putting the demos on social media, paying streamers to advertise it, and trying to make it go viral? Why have I not seen any research papers relating to this machine yet, when it is a machine targetting researchers? Do the bean-counters at public research universities really care about your robot being able to dance? Most of them are lucky to know what TikTok is!
Your 2nd link should've been ignored outright for a channel called 'China Observer', but I'll dignify it with a response.
Why are you skeptical of them and not Unitree? Is there something you're hiding? Some affiliation you don't want us to know about?
Non researcher buys G1, doesn't RL-train it, surprised that it doesn't do anything.
The video says that the person who bought it is skeptical that its motors are even capable of moving like it does in the videos without overheating.
Carefully controlled demos that prove absolutely nothing. Got anything else? Of course you don't.
If you want to continue this conversation, first explain to me what Reinforcement Learning
I have better things to do than argue with a no-life rando on Reddit, but I can explain what Reinforcement Learning is, in a nutshell.
Reinforcement Learning is an online learning paradigm where, given a discrete or continuous action space (actions it can take given a certain state) and a discrete or continuous state space (the result of a given action) an agent attempts to maximize a "reward" signal (a value given after evaluating previous states and actions taken to get to the current state) through trial-and-error. It's a mouthful, but it's the most concise way I could put it without having to bust out a LaTeX editor.
Example algorithms include Q-Learning (where the agent assigns a score to a known set of actions in a given state that attempts to maximize the reward function overall), DQN (like Q-learning but using deep neural networks), and DSAC (one of the newer algorithms that work in continuous action and state spaces that I didn't really read that much on because you're not worth trying to dig up a research paper).
The reason people are skeptical when you cite "China Observer" as a reliable source is because YouTube channels with China in the name tend to center on politics with the goal of spreading a certain agenda.
The more important question is why couldn't you link a science/tech based YouTube channel instead? That would dispel the "Chinese propaganda" concerns you may have, especially if they're Western based.
And what makes you think the Boston Dynamics video you linked also isn't a "carefully controlled demo?" Especially considering the fact that you showed a video DIRECTLY from the company's YouTube channel.
And what makes you think the Boston Dynamics video you linked also isn't a "carefully controlled demo?"
I dunno, maybe because they have demonstratable working models that have actual lifting capacity?
The more important question is why couldn't you link a science/tech based YouTube channel instead?
Because most of the ones talking about it are paid sponsorships, or clearly have no idea what they're talking about. Some of the sites I found talk about how "hollow joint wiring" was a massive innovation, completely ignoring that an older model of the BD Atlas from around 8 years ago not only had that, but 3D printed legs that allow coolant and hydraulic lines to be threaded internally.
It hasn't been on the market long enough to be fully evaluated, and the few actual reviews that contain hard data say it doesn't live up to the hype.
It's almost as if the average person doesn't have $16k lying around to buy an overpriced toy. Whodathunkit?
ngl he lost all credibility when he started throwing insults out of nowhere. Seems to be nothing more than an amateur programmer, robotics wannabee who projects his insecurities on others and gets butthurt that a "witty" statement he made a few weeks ago is nothing but asstalk.
I'd love to see him prove his credibility, but as it stands right now, he isn't capable of holding any nuanced, insightful discussions.
I'm a software engineer with 7+ years of industry experience, a master's degree in computer science with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and I assemble and maintain my own 3D printers which I use for various prototyping tasks (including robotics) in my spare time.
I'm very curious where you got the idea that I'm an "amateur programmer and robotics wannabe" who projects his insecurities onto others. Maybe some projection on your part?
Why would it be CGI? These robots have been around since COVID... These and EVs were about the same time as with deepseek development. In fact, there are a bunch of these advancements coming out of China very soon. There should be one between later this year to mid next year. The other one would be around 2027 and finally 2 major ones in 2030 and by around 2035. Many of us monitoring and keeping tabs on Chinese forums and weibo made a tonne of cash with deepseek crashing the US market as deepseek was already out in their fortune for a year since early 2024...
what do you mean by unexpected environment though? practically by definition, AI-controlled robots can't perform in "unexpected" environments, if you define something unexpected as something far outside their training data.
if you mean like recovering their balance from a stumble or something, we've been able to make robots to do that for a while. in the above clip, you see the robot recovering its balance after the flip.
if you mean something outside of their pre-programmed movements, RL isn't pre-programming, and this is where robots will differ from 10 years ago, even though what they're doing looks the same on the outside. unlike before, we can train robots in physics simulations via rewarding them for good actions rather than having to hard code their recovery mechanisms and behavior. much easier and more flexible than before.
I don't understand either why all those loud overreacting streamers/youtubers are so popular. They probably are targeting kids who enjoy noisy stuff, not really good news for education, though.
Yeah, it mystifies me but as you say probably more for the young ones. I think if what young people liked didn’t mystify me a bit there’d be something wrong with either me or them
Okay. What's really weird about this is I believe this is truly aimed at being more affordable than something like Boston dynamics atlas. Why are we baffled by the movement here? Is this the first time most people are seeing the current abilities of robotics?
Here's a link to the livestream 2:52:50 on YouTube. You can see them touch and carry the robot around. You even see it fail and fall a bunch of times. So it's definitely real and not just cgi.
(please reply if you see this because I'm not sure if my messages are getting deleted for having links)
yep. america is dying under republican rule. they want to drive out immigrants, keep the stupid people within the borders, and defund education to make them even stupider, while the low-iq, born-into-wealth oligarchs hoover up all the money and spend insane amounts on military. so many signs of a dying society. china isnt perfect but it is literally doing a lot of the opposite of america and its really working out for them. as an american i wish them the best
This robot could chop this guys hand off with an axe and he could see the blood spilling from his own arm and hed still say “cgi my blood didnt have shadows” lmaoooo
This is also a dumb argument. The limitation in robotics is the capabilities of the actuators/motors. So if the robot is capable of generating the "twitch" force to do a flip its just a matter of time to send the right signals to do it.
They just piggybacked off of Boston Dynamics and took it further and cheaper. There’s no doubt these are real just advance technology looks like magic to the people who aren’t up to date.
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u/Cthraka 1d ago
And almost every sub on Reddit called this AI generated a month ago.